New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria

Proceedings of the Themed Day of the Fifth Conference of the School of Mamluk Studies
Erscheinungsjahr 2021
ISBN: 978-90-04-44702-8
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 179, 508 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 992 g

Reihe: Islamic History and Civilization

The present volume contributes to research on historic Arabic texts from late medieval Egypt and Syria. Departing from dominant understandings of these texts through the prisms of authenticity and “literarization,” it engages with questions of textual constructedness and authorial agency.

It consists of 13 contributions by a new generation of scholars in three parts. Each part represents a different aspect of their new readings of particular texts. Part one looks at concrete instances of textual interdependencies, part two at the creativity of authorial agencies, and part three at the relationship between texts and social practice. New Readings thus participates in the revaluation of late medieval Arabic historiography as a critical field of inquiry.

Contributors: Rasmus Bech Olsen, Víctor de Castro León, Mohammad Gharaibeh, Kenneth A. Goudie, Christian Mauder, Evan Metzger, Zacharie Mochtari de Pierrepont, Clément Onimus, Tarek Sabraa, Iria Santás de Arcos, Gowaart Van Den Bossche, Koby Yosef.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Steenbergen, Jo van

Termonia, Maya

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Historiographie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Naher & Mittlerer Osten

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

List of Figures and Tables

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: History Writing, Adab and Intertextuality in Late Medieval Egypt and Syria: Old and New Readings

Jo Van Steenbergen

Part 1 Literarization as Adabization: Intertextual Agencies

1 Al-Maqrizi’s Suluk, Muqaffa, and Durar al-?Uqud: Trends of “Literarization” in the Historical Corpus of a 9th/15th-Century Egyptian Shafi?i Religious Scholar

Koby Yosef

2 Language and Style in Mamluk Historiography

Koby Yosef

3 Ibn al-Kha?ib and His Mamluk Reception

Víctor De Castro León

4 Ibn Qa?i Shuhba (1377–1448): His Life and Historical Work

Tarek Sabraa

5 Andalusi Adab in the Mamluk Period

Iria Santas

Part 2 Literarization as Creative Authorship: Contextual Agencies

6 Social and Intellectual Rivalries and Their Narrative Representations in Biographical Dictionaries: The Representation of Ibn al-?ala?—A Case Study

Mohammad Gharaibeh

7 Ibn ?ajar al-?Asqalani’s Texts and Contexts: Producing a Sufi Environment in the Cairo Sultanate

Zacharie Mochtari de Pierrepont

8 If a Governor Falls in Damascus: Early Mamluk Historiography Analyzed through the Story of Sayf al-Din Karay al-Man?uri

Rasmus Bech Olsen

9 Al-?Ayni and His Fellow Historians: Questioning the Discursive Position of a Historian in the Academic Field in the Cairo Sultanate

Clément Onimus

Part 3 Literarization as Social Practice: Textual Agencies

10 Al-Biqa?i’s Self-Reflection: A Preliminary Study of the Autobiographical in His ?Unwan al-Zaman

Kenneth A. Goudie

11 “And They Read in That Night Books of History”: Consuming, Discussing, and Producing Texts about the Past in al-Ghawri’s Majalis as Social Practices

Christian Mauder

12 Historical Representation as Resurrection: Al-Udfuwi and the Imitation of Allah

Ivan Metzger

13 Literarisierung Reconsidered in the Context of Sultanic Biography: The Case of Shafi? b. ?Ali’s Sirat al-Na?ir Mu?ammad (BnF MS Arabe 1705)

Gowaart Van Den Bossche

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Jo Van Steenbergen is Professor of Islamic history (UGent, Belgium). His many publications on late medieval Syro-Egyptian history include Caliphate and Kingship (Brill, 2016), Trajectories of State Formation (ed.) (Brill, 2020) and A New History of the Islamic World (Routledge, 2020).

Maya Termonia is Research Associate and Co-ordinator of the Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate-II and the Islamic History Open Data projects (UGent, Belgium). She is Language Instructor for Egyptian Arabic and Arabic Grammar and a specialist in TAFL methodologies.